Law-abiding citizens? There ain't no such thing. Everybody occasionally breaks the speed limit, on purpose or inadvertently. I knew a preacher in Tucson who jokingly confessed in front of a congregation that he'd occasionally let the speedometer creep up to 60 when he was driving to Phoenix (back during the Arab Oil Embargo and the 55 MPH speed limit days). So I guess guns mostly do that right now.

Another case of cranial/rectal inversion, eh?

Even though it would have violated Iraqi territoriality, such as it is, the US should have sent over a few B-52s to just bomb the hell out of those bases after they were overrun. Easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Three divisions worth of hardware? Geez.

I'll have to take a look at it. I have a 64 gig iPhone and am quite happy with the mix. Interface matters a lot to me, so we shall see.

I really hate this as a direction the industry is going: stream everything! That's fine for a lot of people who live in major metropolitan areas with lots of cell coverage. Here's the problem: we don't have reliable cellular service where we live. Yes, I have it in my house. But once I leave home to go to my wife's work place or down to town, half an hour to either place, no cell service. If I'm driving SE to Texas or Carlsbad, forget it. North to Ruidoso? Nada.

Apple is making their podcast app an increasing exercise in frustration with every iteration. If people want to stream, fine. I want to download apps and music and podcasts when I sync my phone in the morning, and that should be all there is to it. Everything that I've selected should be on the phone at that point, and NOTHING should say 'You have to turn on cellular service to play this podcast.' I DON'T CARE that there are other podcasts that I could stream, I have plenty to listen to and will download those others the next time I sync.

It's driven me to get books on Objective C and Swift and dust off the cobwebs on my C et al skills and roll my own podcast app. Yes, I occasionally look at various iTunes podcast apps in the store, haven't yet found one that did what I want. I'll gladly entertain suggestions for new apps.

Hawaii is a classic case. They took away pot, and crack and meth entered the vacuum. Violent crime skyrocketed.

Thank you for the post! Very interesting stuff.

While the number of guns has increased, the number of households and people with guns have decreased. What you have is a small(ish) group of individuals buying as many guns as they can possibly afford while the broad public sentiment seems to be eschewing gun ownership.

And I have owned probably 20 guns cumulatively and over 10 at the same time at one point. I haven't owned any in over a decade for various reasons. And I don't feel particularly uncomfortable not owning any, though I do miss target and trap & skeet shooting at the range. Still, I have plenty of other entertainments and hobbies to keep me occupied.

I'm not being sarcastic, I'd just like some more info. It's hard for me to do research myself right now as I had cataract surgery and certain types of computer work can be intensely frustrating.

I was taking a refresher algebra course at NMSU, not advanced stuff. Used copies of the text were in the campus bookstore at over $100 a pop. Looking up the ISBN on Amazon? Nothing. Turns out that NMSU provided about 10 pages of additional questions at the end of the book, making it unique.

Rat bastards, all of 'em.

Remember the kid who was taking AP English and writing a paper on 1984? Amazon yanked the book because they screwed up their licensing, and the kid lost all his notes that were on his Kindle.

And considering the strong-arming that Amazon is attempting to do with Hachette and did with Time-Warner Video, they definitely ain't no saints.

I'm taking classes in library science right now, and this is a big problem. I remember using a reference online in class that listed all book stores in the world. It's revised every couple of years, I thought it would be pretty cool (dunno why) to own a copy. The new book is over $500 for a physical copy, you can buy the previous edition on Amazon, ex-libris, for $5 or so.

I don't have a problem, per se, with companies wanting to make a profit. But there's a difference between making a profit and gouging for as much money as you can. Libraries never have as much money as they need, and pricing online material like this is going to move them one step closer to extinction for both the companies making the resources and the libraries themselves.

I had an amazingly weird college book store experience while taking a New Mexico State University class on a military base. I went to the store, on-base, to buy the book for the class. It was a window where you told the worker what class you were taking and they went and got your book. I thought it was maybe because they offered a small number of courses on-base, so they didn't have the room for a big bookstore. Then I take a class in Las Cruces at a large facility: same thing. Zero opportunity to browse shelves and discover new things to learn, something that I loved to do when I lived in Phoenix. New Mexico is a weird place in a lot of ways, but Arizona has gotten even more strange in the last decade.

Today's Dictionary.Com word of the day was 'philology: the love of learning and literature'.

Preferably with shells from an Iowa-class battleship?

I just hope it is more reliable than 29 or 30. I had terrible problems with it spontaneously crashing unless I ran my browser in safe mode. And I don't have much in the way of plug-ins to blame it on.